Have you ever wondered how birds find their way to their migration grounds? Or why ants follow one another to the tiniest crumb of food? From the completely ordinary to the incredibly bizarre, nature sparks us to ask questions…and we’re here to provide answers. Join us each week as we answer questions submitted by you. Submit your questions by the end of day Sunday and then tune in via Facebook Live.
Where in Manayunk does the world’s fastest animal nest? What local creature eats up to 1,000 insects daily? What large bird uses projectile vomiting as an effective defense?! It’s a cornucopia of questions about nature, wildlife, the environment and all things green– even frogs. Gather around the computer and vie for prizes in our live trivia event. First place will receive a $50 gift card to Earth Bread and Brewery. Small prizes will also be awarded to the second and third place teams.Teams can consist of 1-6 players.
Have you ever wondered how birds find their way to their migration grounds? Or why ants follow one another to the tiniest crumb of food? From the completely ordinary to the incredibly bizarre, nature sparks us to ask questions…and we’re here to provide answers. Join us each week as we answer questions submitted by you. Submit your questions by the end of day Sunday and then tune in via Facebook Live.
Often credited with launching the modern environmental movement, the first Earth Day took place on April 22, 1970, in a political climate thick with protests against the Vietnam War and the major American civil rights movement. On the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in 2020, it feels like a very different time. Yet, the turmoil of our own moment and the increasing urgency of the climate crisis give the historical roots of the first Earth Day new relevance.
Artists have played an important role in Earth Day from the beginning, regularly contributing graphic posters and iconography to buoy the movement, participating in Earth Day exhibitions, and offering dramatic, performative actions. Recognizing this rich legacy, this exhibition of works responds to the question of what Earth Day means (or should mean) fifty years after it was first celebrated.
The opening reception will offer a first look at the exhibition, along with refreshments and remarks from the artists and curators.
By Mike Weilbacher
The New Year 2020 promises to be pivotal on a number of fronts, but especially the environment. The increasing urgency of the climate crisis has sparked higher levels of activism by new, youth-led groups like the Sunrise Movement. Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg’s lonely 2018 climates strike in front of the Swedish parliament have blossomed into climate strikes of millions of kids skipping school across the world.
The presidential election near the year’s end promises to be not only loud, but will have an out sized impact on environmental policy, with major implications for how America, and thus the world, responds to climate change.
But 2020 also marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. Philadelphia was center stage for Earth Days in 1970 and 1990, and the global holiday is now credited with launching the environmental movement. Celebrated by over a billion people each year, this April’s Earth Day promises to be huge.
In recognition of all of the above, the Schuylkill Center declares 2020 as our Year of Action and will flavor much of our programming– including our own Earth Day festival– around this concept. Nature Preschoolers will take relevant actions; our Art Department will join in the fun too. So will Land and Facilities, and many programs coming from our Education team.
We’re also asking you to take personal actions at home and in your workplace.
How can you personally assist in cooling the climate and preserving species?
Share your plans at scee@schuylkillcenter.org
By Christina Catanese
A mysterious, vine-woven figure recently appeared behind the Schuylkill Center’s Visitor Center building. Though lacking facial features or limbs per se, it feels human-ish and appears to gaze over the hill into the forest.
This sculpture, created by Brooklyn-based artist Anki King, was the first piece from our fall exhibition to be installed this summer. King harvested vines from the Schuylkill Center property while they were still growing strong in the height of the August growing season for maximum benefit to the ecosystem as well as pliability.
Over the next few weeks, nine more artists will install their work in our environmental art gallery before the show officially opens on Sept. 13. Their work spans a diverse range of practices and materials – along with this vine sculpture, there will be on display wet plate collodion photography, weavings from discarded textiles, ceramic tiles with embroidery details, drawings, polaroids, cyanotypes, printed monotypes and more.
What these works have in common is that all of the artists were 2018 participants in Art in the Open, a public art program in which selected artists create their work on Philadelphia’s Schuylkill Banks for three days. We are pleased to be offering these artists the opportunity to adapt their work to our spaces, continuing our partnership with this citywide program for the third time.
Akin to King, Sivan Ilan utilized unconventional materials in her work, challenging their typical perception as waste or undesirable materials. A master’s student in textile design at Philadelphia University, she created large woven panels made exclusively from scrap fabric found in the university’s studios.
Mia Rosenthal and Christopher Wood present different kinds of drawings which shed light on how a place participates in the drawings themselves.
Rosenthal created detailed ink drawings of items that she found on the ground on the River Trail, as well as in her neighborhood playground. These meticulous portraits of local detritus reveal something about the character of their place.
Wood, in addition to continuing his Daydrawing series (in which he has completed a new powdered graphite drawing each day since Jan. 1, 2016), experimented with ways that the environment could participate in the drawings. He left paper with graphite in various locations on the trail, sometimes weighted with different objects, and allowed the weather and place to shape the material.
Looming large in the room will be a place-specific sculpture transplanted into the gallery by Matt Greco and Chris Esposito. This team participated in Art in the Open for the third time together this year and created an aggrandized form of a bollard – those posts used to secure a ship to a dock with ropes, a ubiquitous element from the Schuylkill River’s shipping history. Blowing this often overlooked object up to a size that cannot be ignored forces reflection on how this industrial legacy may still be felt today.
These works and more draw inspiration from place in a variety of ways, and the particular location of Art in the Open, between the Schuylkill River and the deeply urban built environment of Center City Philadelphia, offers an opportunity for artists to comment on and complicate the relationship between people and nature. Transplanting these works to the Schuylkill Center site, which also borders the River Trail about 10 miles north of the Art in the Open site, gives us a chance to consider these relationships from yet another angle.
Please join us to meet the artists at the opening reception of Art in the Open: Selections from 2018 on Sept. 13 at 6 p.m. Enjoy artist talks, light refreshments in the gallery and a short walk to the outdoor installation. Art in the Open: Selections from 2018 will be on view through Oct. 27.
Christina Catanese directs the Schuylkill Center’s environmental art program, tweets @SchuylkillArt. This blog was originally published in the Montgomery News August 29.
By Melissa Nase, Manager of Land Stewardship
With so many efforts dedicated to tracking the biggest or tallest members of our forest, I thought it was a worthy endeavor to dedicate some time to these smaller, perhaps lesser known, understory trees in our woods. While they will never be the biggest or tallest or most majestic, they deserve accolades of their own. Many produce fruit that are prized by birds and mammals, especially during these winter months. Others provide habitat and cover. And others are just simply beautiful trees, small in stature, but with intricate details that are much easier to observe up close due to their size.
Dogwood (Cornus florida)
A common tree in both the woodland and residential landscape, this tree is easily identified by its white spring blooms in April or May. In the winter, however, the bark and form gives it away. With its light tan, scaly, shallowly furrowed bark, dogwoods take on an alligator type texture. It has a graceful, pyramidal form and is often low branching or multi-stemmed. Later in winter, the buds of new flowers will form like little caps on the ends of the upward facing branches.
Sassafras (Sassafras albidum)
When you find a sassafras tree, you tend to find many sassafras trees. This is one native plant that suckers readily, sending up new shoots from its root system, forming clusters of new trees. In the forest, they are typically found in groves, easily identified by their twisted, gnarly shaped branches. The brown bark is deeply furrowed and forms rectangular blocks with horizontal “breaks”.
Persimmon (Diospyros virginiana)
While the common persimmon is not as common at the Schuylkill Center as the two aforementioned understory trees, there are a handful of them spread throughout old meadows and fields here. This is another tree with distinct bark: it resembles the scales of a dogwood, but it is thicker, more deeply furrowed, and very blocky. You may see bright orange, plum-sized fruits hanging from its bare branches from fall through the winter. Often they are too high to reach, but you may get lucky to snag one for a snack before the wildlife does.
Pawpaw (Asimina triloba)
You may have come across a pawpaw grove on a hike in our woods and not even have realized it. The few young groves that exist here more closely resemble sticks in the ground during the winter than a distinct cluster of trees and saplings. Like sassafras, pawpaws spread through their underground root system, forming new trees by sending up shoots. They can also be propagated fairly easily through seed, although pawpaw often has trouble with pollination and therefore its fruit production is often unreliable. Pawpaws have smooth grey-brown bark that gets slightly more textured with age and dark brown buds. They often have arching trunks and don’t branch until more mature.
Dotted Hawthorn (Crataegus punctata)
Dotted hawthorns grow along forest edges and in old meadows and fields. At the Schuylkill Center, they were planted in the 1960s along a fence row toward the front edge of the property to discourage trespassing. How would a tree discourage trespassing, you may wonder. Hawthorns have sharp spiky thorns, sometimes several inches long, which could be very painful to any passerby. These thorns on the branches are a good way to identify the plant, as well as their bright red berries that persist through the winter as food for birds. It has greyish bark that is irregularly ridged and furrowed.
Enjoy our January mobile field guide as you walk, hike, and play in the winter forest. See other Field Guide posts here.
By Melissa Nase, Manager of Land Stewardship
Enjoy our October mobile field guide as you walk, hike, and play in the fall forests. See other Field Guide posts here.
Highbush Blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum) and Blue Wood Aster (Symphotrichum cordifolium)
The deep red foliage of the blueberry bush is a great contrast to the lighter, more delicate blue wood aster. Both of these plants have their own unique characteristics. Highbush blueberries produce edible fruit enjoyed by humans and birds and are a nice, sculptural addition to your garden. The blue wood asters provide a mat of tiny flowers throughout the fall season. They tend to reseed vigorously. Look for them in our Sensory Garden and in our forest.
Poison Ivy (Toxicodendron radicans)
While you may have your own opinion on poison ivy, I’d like you to try to suspend your negative associations of rashes and calamine lotion and take in the beauty of the fall foliage. Poison ivy is a common native vine that you may see on the forest floor or climbing up trees. Often times, as in this photo, it’s easy to mistake the poison ivy branches for tree branches. While you may question the direct value of this plant to humans, the dark berries that it produces are an important winter food source for birds. Plus, its bright yellow to orange fall color is a great pop of color in the autumn forest. Continue reading
By Melissa Nase, Manager of Land Stewardship
Welcome to our new mobile Field Guides! We’ll regularly post guides about what’s blooming, what animals you can see, and other interesting things to observe in the woods, meadows, and streams. These posts are designed to be easy to read on a phone, meaning you can take this mobile field guide out with you as you walk, hike, and play. See other Field Guide posts here.
Tulip poplar (Liriodendron tulipfera)
The most common tree you will see on the Schuylkill Center’s property, this tree has distinct yellow and orange flowers and leaves that look like cat ears. They grow quickly with very straight trunks, often the first to reclaim open spaces in our forest. Serving an important ecological purpose as well, this tree supports 19 native Lepidoptera species. You may see yellow petals with an orange stripe this time of year – a sure sign that there are tulip poplars overhead.
Northern catalpa (Catalpa speciosa)
These beautiful, showy flowers are from a catalpa tree – a late spring showstopper! With elongated heart-shaped leaves, this tree could easily be confused with the invasive, nonnative empress tree (Paulownia tomentosa) that also can be seen at the center. Later in the year, the catalpa gets long string bean-like seed pods that hang from branches.
Virginia spiderwort (Tradescantia virginiana)
Named for its angular leaf arrangement, native spiderwort can be seen in several meadows here. This plant opens its flowers in the morning and closes them later in the afternoon, with the individual blooms only lasting one day. They self-seed well and add great color to the landscape.
Daisy fleabane (Erigeron annuus)
These rainswept fleabane were spotted in our front garden. Typically located in meadows, woodland edges, or disturbed roadside sites, the dried flowers of this annual plant were believed to rid a home of fleas. These flowers bloom throughout the season, attracting predatory insects to combat insect pests.
Dogbane, Indian Hemp (Apocynum cannabinum)
In the same family at milkweed, this plant has a very high value to pollinators despite its small, inconspicuous greenish-yellow flowers. It may be easier to spot this plant by its reddish stem, and thin, long seed pods later in the year that release seeds with fluffy white pappus attached. While it is a food source for adult butterflies, specifically monarchs, all parts are poisonous to herbivores. As a result, it grows well here despite our large white-tail deer population.
By Mike Weilbacher, Executive Director
On Wednesday, April 22, 1970, 45 years ago today, more than 20 million Americans participated in the largest mass demonstration in American history, some 1 million in New York City alone. They marched wearing gas masks and buried cars in mock graves protesting polluted air, threw buckets of dead fish into the lobbies of corporate offices to protest polluted water, and carried signs with grim messages like “RIP: Earth.”
It was the first Earth Day. Reflecting back, it’s too easy to forget how angry people were about a polluted planet back in 1970.
In Philadelphia, thousands gathered on Belmont Plateau for speakers like Edmund Muskie, then a leading presidential contender, and beat poet Allen Ginsberg, honoring the intention of creating a “national environmental teach-in” as envisioned by then-Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, father of the event.
As a middle schooler on Long Island, I organized a litter cleanup in my town’s park. Bitten by the environmental bug then, I knew I’d be doing environmental work now.
Fast forward 20 years. On Saturday, April 22, 1990, 120,000-plus people crammed into Fairmount Park under a picture-perfect day for a family-oriented festival of music, games, speeches, food and more. Here’s an irony: Earth Day 1990 shut down the Schuylkill for hours, and the crowd left behind mountains of unrecyclable trash. Oops.
But more than 200 million people from 141 countries participated, the largest mass event in world history.
This year? Thousands already joined Usher, will.i.am, Mary J. Blige, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, and Interior Secretary Sally Jewell on the Mall in DC last weekend, while 2,500 runners joined the Clean Air Council’s Run for Clean Air, our city’s longest running Earth Day event. It’s the “Phillies Red Goes Green” event tonight in the stadium, and hundreds of groups are hosting Earth Day activities bookending these two weekends, like my Schuylkill Center’s Naturepalooza festival on Saturday.
And 1 billion people—1 in 7 worldwide—from 200 countries will participate. Surprise: Earth Day is suddenly one of the world’s largest nonreligious observances.
Dismiss Earth Day if you will—and many do—you have to give it this: the day has staying power, and a heckuva track record. 1970’s massive demonstration jumpstarted the modern environmental movement, a raft of environmental groups like Friends of the Earth were founded, Nixon caved to mounting pressure and signed bills creating the EPA, impact statements, and the endangered species act, and thousands of kids like me went into environmental careers. Almost every curbside recycling program is brought to you courtesy of 1990’s toned-down Earth Day, as are dolphin-safe tuna, recycled paper products, and Rio’s Earth Summit.
Since we are much better counter-punching than planning, 1970’s Earth Day was a reaction to the Santa Barbara oil spill, DDT and eggshell thinning, Lake Erie being declared biologically dead, lead from gasoline lowering people’s IQ. 1990 in turn was a counter-punch to medical waste washing up alongside dead dolphins, Yellowstone burning under a fierce drought, and NASA scientist James Hanson testifying in Congress that the world was warming, the first scientist to do so.
It’s easy to see what 2020 will be in reaction to: in the next five years, new data—not to mention, say, a giant iceberg calving off the Antarctic shelf—will likely end the 25-year debate on climate change, the disappearance of a charismatic species like the rhinoceros will call make biodiversity a top-tier issue, and horrific droughts here and floods there will signal the emergence of water as a central concern.
The environment likely surfaces—finally!—as a core issue in that year’s presidential election.
So Earth Day 2020’s confluence of big anniversary with monstrous problems will cause the day to explode, and more than 2 billion of us—double this year—will participate, easily a low-ball estimate.
For a green tsunami is coming, a tidal wave of concern for the fate of an imperiled planet. And love it or loathe it, Earth Day will be at the heart of that tsunami.
The day is here to stay, and will only get bigger. Happy Earth Day.